Maradiva Villas Resort and Spa

Beautiful villa and excellent food, but disappointing service

We stayed at Maradiva for six nights on our honeymoon in a Luxury Villa, paying around $1,200 per night. The first thing I want to commend is the hotel and grounds itself. The hotel is utterly beautiful, with amazing finishing touches. It's clean, tidy and finished to an incredibly standard. The food was amazing and the staff were friendly, from concierge to gardeners. Unfortunately, the actual service was consistently disappointing and fell well short of what we expected at this price. My immediate judgement is that the hotel had amazing people working there, who simply weren't trained in basic hotel customer service, which was a massive shame.

Our villa was lovely: comfortable, private and beautifully presented, with a wonderful outdoor space and private pool. The grounds were equally impressive. We also loved the spa and thought the treatments were excellent. There is a lot to praise about the hotel itself.

We tried all the restaurants and were thoroughly impressed by the food. However, dining was very expensive even with half board. We were paying supplements of around $40 per person for almost every meal, on top of what we had already paid. Having just come from a half board fairmont stay (where even the mini bar was free), and receiving a $0 bill, this was disappointing and felt 'cheap'. We arrived early on the first day and when we asked for a breakfast, the first thing we were told was 'you'll have to pay for it'.

This first interaction persisted throughout the stay, which was a real disappointment. Every day we had at least one fairly major customer service issue. These were not one or two isolated mistakes over the course of the stay. A coffee by the pool took over 30 minutes and needed chasing (eventually being told 'the machine had broken'), cups were missing after housekeeping, and on one occasion our villa still had not been cleaned by 5:40 pm, so we had to call to ask for it to be done. I ordered a drink from 1 bar and was told I needed to order it from the other bar because of where we were sitting. In any other 5 star hotel I've stayed at with a similar vibe (and similar half/full board setup) - the drinks would just be moved from one place to the next without question.

On the beach one day, there were no towels on the loungers. We raised the yellow service flag (which we'd been told was the way to get someone's attention) and waited 45 minutes without anyone coming over, while a nearby attendant was on his phone. Eventually, I went to the pool area and took some towels from existing loungers. I had to go up to the bar to get a drink every single time.

Service in the villa was also poorly coordinated. We would get four or five separate doorbell rings a day for things such as changing towels, cleaning the room, cleaning outside, replacing cups and bringing fresh water. We appreciated that these jobs needed doing, but the constant interruptions made it difficult to relax and enjoy the privacy of the villa. There seemed to be no effort to combine visits or arrange them while we were out, even when we had restaurant reservations. The biggest annoyance was the turn down service. Without fail, the attendant would come asking us for a turn down service 45 minutes before we were heading out for dinner - surely they'd be able to see when we were likely to be away? In addition - the 'make my room' and 'do not disturb' buttons made no difference.

The most concerning was the handling of food at breakfast. We saw birds eating from the cereal that guests were helping themselves to at the buffet, as well as pecking at cooked à la carte dishes left out awaiting collection by waiters. A waiter then attempted to serve us waffles that we had watched birds pecking at for more than ten minutes. We refused them. I raised this with a manager, who apologised and said the kitchen would be informed, but the same problem was still happening the next day. Open air buffets and birds are not a unique thing to a hotel stay, and I would expect much much better. Frankly, every bit of food we ordered after was a la carte, and we made sure to watch it come from the kitchen straight to our table, rather than enjoying the beach views.

I will give credit to the waiters, though. Generally - the food service was very good. The waiters tried incredibly hard to make every meal enjoyable, particularly at Cilantro and the beach house grill.

We raised the service issues during our stay rather than saving them all for checkout. The response was repeatedly some version of “thank you for letting us know, we’ll tell management”, with no noticeable improvement. For the food service issue, I went to reception to ask for the manager directly to feed this back, but the response was still the same. When I fed everything back again while settling our substantial bill for extras, the response was simply the same. No manager came to speak to us, no refund or other gesture was offered, and we left feeling that there had been no meaningful acknowledgement of how disappointing the experience had been. The entirety of this stay exceeded $10,000 for less than a week. It was our honeymoon and it put a real dampener on it.

I want to be clear that the staff were warm, polite and friendly. My impression was that they lacked the training and coordination needed to deliver the standard of service the hotel’s pricing promises.

We had come from a Fairmont safari stay, where our accommodation was a tent without air conditioning. Maradiva was far more luxurious in terms of the accommodation, but the service at the Fairmont was worlds apart. We even felt better looked after at our 3 star airport hotel in Nairobi.

For us, three stars reflects the beautiful villa, excellent food and wonderful spa, weighed against persistent service failures and the way our concerns were handled. At around $1,200 a night, we expected considerably better. This was our honeymoon, and although we enjoyed parts of the stay, we left deeply disappointed. At the price we paid, I could not recommend Maradiva.

I had a very nice vacation here. Particularly I enjoyed the 24h gym with a good variety of cardio and weights/machines. Furthermore, I'd like to highlight that Imran, their personal trainer, is very friendly, customer oriented and knowledgeable. I've received some very useful advice during my training sessions there. I'm looking forward to coming back soon!

The property is amazing. It is a massive space on one of the best beaches of Mauritius. Almost all rooms/villas have their own private pools. The bathrooms are ultra modern, luxurious and spacious. The bedroom, veranda and patio were very nice and comfortable. The property has amazing 3/4 restaurants with multiple cusines. We're pure vegetarian and didn't have any issues or struggles with the same. Definitely a 5/5 property and 10/10 experience for us.